WordPress themes are very essential in customizing your site in order for it to look unique and personal. They are available from very many sources on the internet both for free and at a small fee. Most WordPress themes will however come with signature links attached to their design. This is in a bid to give recognition to the author of the theme and to protect the theme from piracy and copyrighting. Usually, signature links appear at the bottom of the website or blog as footer links.

Signature links can be very annoying to the blogger especially when you are unable to remove them. Even though as a blogger you have adopted someone’s theme, you would still want your site to look unique and professional and to give your visitors the idea that you are a professional designer. This impression can be a bit difficult to pull off especially with the signature links of your themes author or designer dominating the bottom of your page.

Some pages will come with encrypted footer links that are also a bit complex to remove. The footer links sponsor the designer of the theme on the forum or blog. They will often compromise the authority of the blogger or webmaster in the search engine’s eyes. In some cases the links might even be given priority of the search engine. This necessitates the need to remove these links in order to be in total command of what is shown on your blog.

What most end users or bloggers and webmasters do not know is that the themes are released under the GPL and so they can be customized as opposed to what many designers will tell you. Below are some of the steps you can take to remove footer links from your WordPress site.

Usually, most theme designers will code their signature links on the templates even though the templates are not complex. In most cases, they use the base64 encoder that hides the links. To remove such like links, you can simply navigate to the footer.php file and delete the coded links then update the theme. If this method does not work, you can decode the links using base64 decoder, replace the coded links with the decoded ones and then delete them.

For other templates, removing the footer links is simple as they can be found on the footer.php file from where they can easily be deleted. Some templates are not so because the signature links cannot be de viewed on the footer.php file. In such a case, the themes may be hidden in the theme’s function.php file. Trace the themes here and then delete them or decode them first if there is need to before deleting, using the same method mentioned above.

There are other signature links that are impossible to remove from the theme. This is a tactic used by some designers to make some money. If you like your theme but for the footer links, they charge you a fee to remove them for you.